‘The Midwest Is What's Left Over’

Before too many exotic political analyses are based on Gerald Ford's being a Midwesterner, I would like to point out that he is not a Midwesterner. He is an Expatriate Midwesterner. They form a separate subculture, like the Overseas Chinese. For the past quarter of a century, he has lived in the East with a wife who is, I suspect, sophisticated enough to refer to this just‐a‐simple‐American‐lad business as his “Grand Rapids number.” My suspicion about Mrs. Ford's views is based not on inside information but on my own wife's habit of lumping certain of my attitudes into what she calls my “Kansas City act.”

Continuing to think of oneself as a Midwesterner despite all geographical evidence to the contrary is not necessarily an “act” or a “number,” and thinking that it is, I keep telling my wife, is merely a manifestation of her fancy Eastern ways. (She says phrases like “fancy Eastern ways” are part of my Kansas City act). But just how Expatriate Midwesterners can genuinely try to remain Midwestern and still be unlike real Midwesterners requires a discussion of some terms:

Expatriate Midwesterner. An ExMid —as some flashy social scientist will eventually get around to calling us—is someone who lives on either coast or abroad but still prefers to think of himself at least partly as a Midwesterner. They are easily distinguished from people who just happen to have been born in the Midwest. Among literary types, for instance, T. S. Eliot (St. Louis/London) was not an ExMid, Kurt Vorinegut Jr. (Indianapolis/Manhattan) is. Marlon Brando and Dick Cavett are both from Nebraska, but Cavett is an ExMid and Brando isn't. Gerald Ford (“call me Jerry”) is an ExMid; Thomas E. Dewey (“call me Governor”) was not. What separates an ExMid from other former Midwesterners is one overpowering fear that may come to dominate his life—the fear that his mother or aunt or cousin will be cornered by some neighbor at his hometown supermarket and informed that he has bei come too big for his britches. You might think that this fear makes the ExMid's Midwestern behavior artificial —like the behavior of a Hungarian refugee who still has relatives behind what used to be called the Iron Curtain. You would be wrong. As it happens, worrying about being accused of being too big for one's britches is very Midwestern.

The Middle West. Midwesterners are those Americans who don't think of themselves as Westerners or Southerners or Californians or New Englanders or Easterners, etc. In other words, the Midwest is what's left over. There are undoubtedly psychiatrists who would say that ExMids make an issue of being from the Midwest because they are actually defensive about being from a place that is left over—or even that ExMids fear accusations about their britches because they feel guilty about leaving and thus symbolically rejecting their hometowns. Psychiatrists are, wherever they live, Eastern.

Middle America. When this term first surfaced, the possibility that it was meant geographically rather than economically or socially or culturally never occurred to me. (So much for our alleged defensiveness!) I thought it was just another one of those vague and generally useless terms that Washington columnists like to toss around as a way of making themselves feel superior to the general population. Then I read a Toronto newspaper's series on the subject datelined Kansas City, Mo., and realized that the Middle American everyone had been talking about was, in a manner of speaking, me. Now the same columnists are telling us that Gerald Ford—a man who studied at an Ivy League university and once owned a piece of a Manhattan modeling agency, a man whose wife graduated from Bennington and danced with Martha Graham and got divorced and openly consulted a psychiatrist, a man whose daughter attends private school—is a Middle American. I'm beginning to think these columnists have become too big for their britches.

The necessity of facing an election every two years in the Fifth Congressional District of Michigan might, of course, encourage a certain amount of ExMid behavior in any man. But I think Gerald Ford would have behaved the same way if he had decided to practice law in New York or even if he had remained in the modeling game. He is a genuine ExMid. That means clues to his attitudes will be found not in the attitudes of a hypothetical Pontiac dealer in Grand Rapids but in those of the Pontiac dealer's hypothetical brother, a stockbroker on Wall Street who firmly believes that on the day he starts wearing Italian shoes and drinking foreign wine an old high school buddy from Grand Rapids will arrive to make fun of him for doing so. There is no way for the stockbroker to hide. I believe that the last Major American Novelist to be listed openly in the Manhattan telephone directory was an ExMid. He obviously feared the derision that would result from old high school buddies’ discovering he had an unlisted number more than he feared crank calls.

The antimonarchist approach Ford has, taken to the Presidency so far is more ExMid than Midwestern. To estimate the likelihood of a real Midwestern President telling the band not to play “Hail to the Chief” every time he changes chairs, we need only study the behavior of some citizen (selected at random, of course) who has remained in the Midwest. Henry Ford will do. He and the President are from the same state and they even have the same name. They both attended Yale. Obivously, the only significant difference between them is that Henry Ford (like one of Gerald Ford's brothers) decided to stay in Michigan and look after the family business. And what is Henry Ford like? Well, he gives his daughters 250‐thousand — dollar coming — out parties and then marries them off to the kind of foreigners who affect titles. Would he be just folks in the White House? As we sometimes say in Missouri, not hardly.

An ExMid often seems more “Midwestern” than a Midwesterner for the same reason that some New Zealanders seem more “English” than the English—his picture of the Mother Country was frozen on the day of his departure. Knowing that “changing” is equivalent to becoming too big for one's britches (“He's changed. Jerry's changed. He's not the same old Jerry.”), an ExMid loses sight of the fact that the Midwest has changed. Despite everything he reads in the paper and even sees with his own eyes, he finds it difficult to believe that his friends in Michigan are all wearing Italian shoes and drinking foreign wines.

Some ExMids are so reluctant to acknowledge change that, after thirty years or so in the East, they will barely admit to having left the Midwest at all (“Well, I live in Washington now. But I'm really from Minnesota”). Several years ago, I admitted in print that if I were asked to name my United States Senator by one of those pollsters who go around periodically to demonstrate that the American public has never heard of the Secretary of Defense, I would say Thomas F. Eagleton, despite the legal technicality of my New York registration. The alternative would be Stuart Symington, and although he may have lived in St. Louis longer than I lived in Kansas City, he didn't grow up there, and I have always thought of him as an Easterner. One thing I learned in high school in Kansas City is that Midwesternism cannot be created or destroyed, only changed in form.